


baggage is checked at the door

by winterbones



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, PWP, special guest star: tony stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:45:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterbones/pseuds/winterbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Oh," Tony says, "Mess. I thought we were being metaphorical."</p>
            </blockquote>





	baggage is checked at the door

It’s like a warzone, blood exchanged for a bright spectrum of hues, reds and greens and yellows, splattered and smudged on the floor. Natasha had known that letting Clint hole up in his little closest of an apartment had been a bad idea. Downtime—she got it, she needed it too; there was something safe, protective, about going off the grid. Natasha’s haunts usually ran to the anonymity of gloomy Parisian side streets, while Clint preferred the clatter and crowd of urban decay.

“Hotshot?” she calls, bright blue tarp crunching under her feet. She’s glad she forwent her heels today, trading them out for her purple flip-flops, a baggy tee, and running shorts. If she had gotten paint on her Louis Vuitton she would have cheerfully shoved her six-inch heel up his ass.

Clint doesn’t hear her, head bopping along to whatever song is pumping out through his headphones. He has a bright streak of yellow across his cheek and a paint roller in his hands, dripping red onto the tarp. Natasha resists the urge to set her teeth. Clint’s never been the leading expert on taste and style—he only put away that ridiculous purple spandex after Commander Fury had issued the order himself—but even this was much. Natasha had to save him, and if not him then the poor room, at least, who had never done anything to deserve the treatment it was currently getting.

Natasha knows Clint isn’t okay, and she has no expectations for him to be. Loki had left his mark, deep rivets in his skin, and she doesn’t expert those to heal over night. But she’s never been one inclined to pity and she only knew one direction—forward—and she knows that Clint isn’t either.

“Barton,” she says, louder, and tugs on one earbud. He turns his head, and she sees that he’s somehow managed to get a small slash of green paint over his lip, nearly unnatural its perfect geometric precision. Natasha shakes her head.

“Nat, hey,” he says, and loops the wire of his headphones around the back of his neck. “What’s up?”

“Not your color scheme, obviously.”

Clint glances at his walls, as if the first time noticing the unholy mess he’s left. He blinks and grins sheepishly. Halfway through purple, he changed to red, and then somewhere in the middle his yellows bled into his greens and Natasha has no idea when this occurred to him as a good idea.

“I may have gotten a little out of hand,” he begins.

“A little,” Natasha says.

“It’s high art,” he says mock-hauntingly.

“It’s a sin against nature.”

“It’s not _that_ bad.”

She looks at him.

Clint laughs. “Okay, it’s that bad. It’s just—” He hesitates here, and maybe Natasha’s heart turns over just a little bit, because she remembers how small he had looked, his veins still blue from Loki’s influence, as he struggled to come back into himself, to fit into skin suddenly compressed too tightly. “I didn’t like the color.”

This room had been a tasteful blue two days again. Natasha had liked it.

She steps away from him, confident that she has his attention and kicks off her flip-flops, sending them sprawling a safe distance away from the blast radius of his paint grenade. Clint’s eyes are on her back, she can feel them, intense and longing and that’s half the problem—he’s so withdrawn, not like Clint at all; it was always a comfort, knowing that as bad as things got Clint was always going to be Clint, confident and cocksure and just a tad bit annoying with it all. And she misses him, and she’s not used to that, missing a presence in her bed, crammed in together because it’s not really meant to house more than a single body.

Well, Natasha has a patient nature, unless she decides the situation doesn’t require patience.

Her thumbs hook into the elastic of her running shorts and she shimmies them down over her waist. Clink makes a strangled sound behind her—two months, three days, and six hours; not that she’s counting since the last time she had shoved him up against the shower wall and gotten the taste of him in her mouth, sort of metallic, a bit like blood—and she flips her hair out of her eyes before pulling her top over her head, clad only in a sports bra and her panties.

“You can’t let him win, you know,” she tells him, looking out of his wide glass windows. They’re open, but she’s not really worried. On the top floor and looking out into a dead alleyway, it’s not likely anyone will care to look up.

“Nat—”

She spins on her heel, an elegant pirouette, and sends him a look. “Don’t tell me you don’t _want_ to fuck me.”

He scowls. Clint isn’t the sort who likes to be outright pushed, Natasha has discovered. He needs to be nudged, subtly maneuvered, but she supposes she _has_ grown impatience after all. She’s not used to missing people, but she misses him.

“ _That_?” he admits. “Is never going to happen.”

She steps closer, her toes sinking into a droplet of paint, cold and shocking. She lays a hand on his chest. “It’s okay to be scared, to be angry, but it’s not okay to stop your life.” He’s never been picked apart and put back together, dissected and reconnected, had someone wedging into your brain, into all the little hidey-holes of your memory, to feel that sort of exposure and that sort of vulnerability. She knows what can happen, if he lets it gnaw a hole in him, because it happened to her. Sometimes she still feels the Red Room burning like an acidic chemical in her stomach lining, threatening to punch through her ribs. She’s learning how to push it back, bury it, but she doesn’t want him to ever have to learn those kinds of survival tactics. No one should have to.

His hands are fisted at his side, but when he lifts them they’re splayed apart, and when he lays his palm against her cheek its tender and she doesn’t even mind the cold smudge of paint over her cheekbone.

“You are severely overdressed for this party,” she observes and he laughs again and _there_ is his mouth, grinding down on hers. It’s not normally easy, or gentle, between them but they’re not normally easy or gentle people, but she senses the hesitation in his kiss, the way he reigns himself in. She almost growls, and gives him a shove so there’s enough space between them to yank his shirt over his head. It lands with a wet plop in his bucket of paint. Natasha doesn’t care since it was a tacky shirt anyway.

“Ah, _shit_ ,” he hisses out against her teeth because Natasha isn’t holding back, and her hand is already shoved into his jeans and cupping his half-hard cock, urging him to undo the snap of his jeans. It kicks up a splatter of paint when it plops on the floor. She wriggles out of the last of her clothing, having the forethought to kick her panties toward the door because they were one of her favorite pairs and she was not having them covered in paint.

They crash to their knees, and it’s an odd sensation, to be so hot on the inside and feel cold and slick from the paint. He mouths her breasts, finger plucking at her nipple, and she arches against him, fingers sliding through his hair before biting into the back of his neck. He’s still wearing his dogtags—SHIELD doesn’t require them because most of the time they’re in places where, if they die, people _can’t_ know, but Clint’s told her it’s an old habit, that he likes having his name and number against his chest, like he’d forget otherwise, and she understands the sentiment—and the metal is warmed by his skin.

Clint falls backwards, urging her up and on him, and his cock rubs against the slick, wet spot between her legs. “C’mon, Nat.” His fingers move over her stomach, leaving messy streaks of yellow and red and green, and he bucks up into her.

For a moment she’s so desperate to have inside her, because it’s been _so_ long, that she almost does—has one hand fisted around his turgid length, hips rising—before she remembers. She glares at him, and scoots off, butt plopping wetly onto the tarp.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Clint says, almost like a whine, snapping up sharply at his waist.

“Think you’re a big bad wolf now? Think you’re going to hurt me?” Natasha stretches out on her back, knees bent. She has no problem being in control, likes being in control more often than not, but she won’t be his reason for _not_ being in control. That’s just another excuse, another attempt at hiding. “Give it your best try, hotshot. I double dog dare you.”

“You don’t know—”

“Really? You think I don’t?” They’re not much for talking, her and Clint, because they know each other inside and out, and he knows that yes she does know, and probably better than him. “You’re not going to hurt me, Clint.”

“I almost did,” and he sounds so miserable about it Natasha just wants to put her arms around him and hold, but that isn’t going to help, or solve anything, and she loves him too much to do something like to him. To let him wallow in his own self pity until he drowns.

“And I hurt you right back,” she points out. “That wasn’t you. You think it was? If I thought, for a split second, that any part of that was actually you I’d snap your neck faster than you could blink, and you know I could.”

He sits up, bracing his palms on his knees, and looks at her harshly. He’s breathing roughly, like he’s run a mile, and Natasha knows detox when she sees it and some part of her wishes she could be gentle, but that’s not what she’s capable of, and that’s not what he needs. He needs to know that it was a fast-acting poison, and that’s it ripped through his system, and that he’s damaged, wrecked, like a neighborhood after a tornado, but that he’s _okay_.

“I wasn’t always good, remember? If you were going to kill me, you would have done it when you had the chance.” She sits up at her middle, and reaches out. Her fingers close around his dogtags, the ridges biting into her palm. “I’m not giving you an out, Clint, and I want all or nothing. So if you’re not going to climb on top of me right now, then let a body know so I can put my pants back on.”

The laugh shocks her, it rumbles harshly out of his chest, and he has to bow over to fight the strength of it. Natasha’s concerned, until he looks up at her with a wide grin. “You’re such a ballbuster, Tasha.”

She gives the tags a little tug. “You can take it,” she points out.

“What can I say?” He leans in, gives her a quick, hard kiss that leaves her dizzy. “I’m a masochist. Now lay back.”

Natasha does with a slow smile. Clint curls one hand around the backs of her knee and lifts her leg, pressing an open mouth kiss to the curve of her calf. He tongues a slow, wet trail up the inside of her legs, and she’s already lifting herself up into his mouth before he sinks his tongue into her slit. Her fingers fist over the tarp as a wordless cry escapes her, as he laps up the slick juices and one thumb presses down her clit. He holds her still against when she would have bucked, nails digging bluntly into her flesh. Her heel digs into the bones between his shoulder blades as he twists his tongue inside her, muscles flexing, his moans reverberating inside her. He turns his head, and his chin bumps up against her cleft and she can’t help the yelp of pained pleasure as he kisses the red marks of irritation his fingers have left on the inside of her legs.

He makes a slow, languid crawl up her body, kissing her naval and her stomach, the underside of her breasts and the valley between them. She hooks her arms around his neck and bears him tightly against her, and metal of his dogtags digging into her breast.

“Nat,” he says, sounding drunk, sounding like a prayer, “ _Nat_ ,” and he thrusts into her, big and warm and solid. She pants an odd mixture of half-English half-Russian endearments and encouragements against his ear—harder and faster and deeper, and he answers each one like she knows he will.

They slip more than slide on the paint and end up laughing, which is a new thing for them. They handle sex, normally, the way they handle just about everything in life—with a marrow deep seriousness, determination, their eyes fixated on the prize at the finish line. The hands she had curled desperately in the tarp end up in his hair, leaving ridiculous streaks of green, and her breasts end up glistening bright yellow.

Clint bows over her, half-raised, and forges into her. One hand is fisted beside her face, the other gripping her hip in a relentless grasp, lifting her body to receive his thrusts. She had told him this was all him, and she had meant it, and she does nothing more than match his pace, never sets her own. His brows have furrowed, leaving a deep, etched line of concentration between them, and sweat condenses along the sides of his face. She watches, fascinated, at focus there, the determination to get as deep inside her as he can.

He reaches between their bodies, and plucks at the bundle of nerves at the hood of her sex, pinching. He knows her enough to know that it has to be pleasure and pain to get her off, a throwback to those days she would never let herself forget, even if remembering them is a torment. She throws herself upward, against him, legs tightened and body thrumming as her climax rips through her. Her teeth sink into his shoulder and he curses, his hips snapping, pumping, driving into her over and over again. She can feel his muscles tightening in his sides, at the small of his back where her ankles are locked, and then he pulls up flush against her, hissing out her name on a long string of disjointed syllables.

They collapse back onto the tarp, and Natasha starts laughing. There’s paint in Clint’s hair, and its making it stick up in neon green points, like the morning after a rave, and she can feel blobs of paint drying on her back, in her hair, and her breasts are slick with it. The tarp is a canvas of their fucking, imprints of her ass and his knees and their hands, and his dogtags have left an impression on her left breast.

“We’re a mess,” she tells him, a dead weight on top of her.

“We’re a beautiful mess,” he manages weakly, chest still heaving, and presses a sloppy, wet kiss to the patch of skin where her neck curls into her shoulder. He pulls out of her with a pop and rolls onto his back. The paint squelches beneath him and makes Natasha laugh again.

Her phone goes off a few minutes later from its safe place at the threshold of the door. Natasha isn’t sure how Stark got her number, since she’s so unlisted she doesn’t technically exist, but apparently she and Clint are the only two people still in New York City and with Pepper out he manages to guilt them both into meeting him for lunch.

“We’re a mess,” Natasha warns him, holding her phone to her ear with the two fingers not covered in paint. Clint’s kissing her stomach, one of the few places on her body not a Picasso imitation, and the fingers of her free hand are tangled with his above her head.

“Have you seen me?” Tony demands. “C’mon. I’m sorry the shawarma sucked, but this is Chinese food. Who doesn’t like Chinese food?”

Clint detangles himself and snags her phone, sending her an apologetic grimace when she pinches the skin at his side. He’s gotten paint all over her iphone.

“Don’t you have any _real_ friends, Stark?” Clint demands, and whatever Stark says next makes a laugh tear up Clint’s chest. “God, that’s just about the saddest thing I’ve heard. We’ll be there in fifteen, Stark—you’re paying. Don’t give me that crap, you’re billionaire and we’re on the government payroll.”

Fifteen minutes isn’t enough time to shower, so they forgo it all together and show up at the Chinese restaurant with paint in their hair and paint on their skin, their nails caked with it. Tony’s wearing darkly tinted shades and they slid down the bridge of his nose in a gesture of shock.

“Oh,” Tony says. “ _Mess_. I thought we were being metaphorical.”


End file.
